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Paul Le Blanc: Lenin and Luxemburg through each other’s eyes

August Thalheimer, a revolutionary who knew and worked with both of them,
insisted on the formulation “not Luxemburg or
Lenin – but Luxemburg and Lenin”,
explaining that “each of them gave ... what the other did not, and could not,
give”.

January
3, 2013 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- Vladimir
Ilyich Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg first met in 1901 but actually got to know each
other amid the revolutionary workers’ insurgencies sweeping through Russia and
Eastern Europe in 1905-1906. As Luxemburg biographer J. P. Nettl tells us:

A
personal sympathy between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg – based, like all Lenin’s
friendships, on mutual respect – was born at this time [in 1906] and was to
survive for six years until party differences drowned it once more in the froth
of polemics. Even then a spark of personal sympathy always survived the renewed
hostilities ...[1]

Political
theorist Hannah Arendt, drawing Nettl’s study, concludes that “there were few
people she respected [as intellectual equals], and [Leo] Jogiches [Luxemburg’s
close comrade in the Polish movement] headed a list on which only the names of
Lenin and [Marxs’s outstanding biographer] Franz Mehring could be inscribed
with certainty.” In 1911, she wrote: “Yesterday Lenin came, and up to today he
has been here four times already. I enjoy talking with him, he's clever and
well educated, and has such an ugly mug, the kind I like to look at.” Luxemburg
commented that her cat Mimi “impressed Lenin tremendously, he said that only in
Siberia had he seen such a magnificent creature, that she was ... a majestic
cat. She also flirted with him, rolled on her back and behaved enticingly
toward him, but when he tried to approach her she whacked him with a paw and
snarled like a tiger.”[2]
This symbolises the political differences that flared up between them, on which
we will focus here.

Complex
historical developments give some credence to Luxemburg’s warnings about the
divisive, diversionary and destructive impact that nationalism can have for the
working class. Lenin, on the other hand, is attentive to differences between
the nationalism of oppressor nations (involving imperialism and racism, which
must be opposed) and the nationalism of the oppressed (involving struggles
against imperialism and racism, which should be supported).[3]
It could be argued that there is truth in each of these divergent perspectives.

Imperialism

In both Luxemburg’s
The Accumulation of Capital and
Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of
Capitalism the capitalist system is portrayed as inherently imperialistic
and violent. Yet Luxemburg, in contrast to Lenin, does not see imperialism as
the highest stage of capitalism, or as something that arose in the late 19th
century due to the consolidation of multinational corporations under the
influence of finance capital. For her it has existed as an integral part of
capitalism from its very beginning.

Lenin
largely popularises the work of others – J. A. Hobson, Rudolf Hilferding and
Nikolai Bukharin. Luxemburg offers an original and controversial analysis that
is critical of what has been called the “realisation theory” (having to do with
how exchange-values are transformed into actual prices) in the second volume of
Marx’s Capital. While Lenin tends to
see multifaceted dimensions, fluidity and flexibility in capitalist expansion,
Luxemburg believes that there are limits – a necessity for capitalism to expand
into non-capitalist territories, which will eventually be used up, leading to
crisis and collapse.[4]

“She has
got into a shocking muddle”, Lenin complained. “She has distorted Marx.” Yet
even economists inclined to agree with Lenin have insisted that Luxemburg was
raising important questions, and some economists have insisted that some of the
answers she provided are well worth considering. One of her severest critics, Russian
Marxist Nikolai Bukharin, hailed Luxemburg’s analysis as “a daring theoretical
attempt” and “the deed of a brilliant theoretical intellect”. Ernest Mandel,
agreeing with other critics on what he considers secondary issues, nonetheless
argues that “the final balance-sheet on Luxemburg’s critique ... must be a
nuanced one. We cannot say baldly that she is right or that she is wrong.”[5]

Another
major aspect of Luxemburg’s masterwork involved a set of chapters in
which she examines, with anthropological sensitivity, the devastating impact of
capitalist expansion on the rich variety of the world’s peoples and cultures. For
Lenin, this vivid contribution was yet another negative feature. In his
marginal notes in her book, he wrote: “The description of the torture of
negroes in South America is noisy, colorful and meaningless. Above all it is
‘non-Marxist’.” Almost half a century later, noting the “criticism”, Hannah
Arendt commented aptly, “but who would deny today that it belonged in a book on
imperialism?”[6]

Luxemburg’s
biographer J. P. Nettl, observes, however, that Lenin “read The Accumulation of Capital in 1913, at
a time when his political relations with Rosa Luxemburg were at their worst;
his critical notes in the margin of the manuscript indicate that he was out to
fault her wherever possible; they abound with exclamations like ‘nonsense’ and
‘funny’.” The underlying point of contention between the two revolutionaries at
this time was a new flare-up of disagreements on “the organisation question”.[7]

Organisation

There
were, over the years, significant fluctuations in Luxemburg’s assessment of
Lenin’s organisational orientation. In 1904, she wrote a savage critique of One Step Forward, Two Steps Back,
Lenin’s explanation of the Bolshevik/Menshevik split in the Russian Social
Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), accusing Lenin of an ultra-centralist and
authoritarian orientation that – seeking to ensure “revolutionary purity” –
would result in the creation of an irrelevant sect. In 1905-1906, based on a
changed situation (including closer contact with Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in a
period of revolutionary upsurge), Luxemburg shifted to a pro-Bolshevik
position. By 1907, she was defending Lenin from the same kinds of criticisms
(this times advanced by Menshevik luminary George Plekhanov) that she herself
had made three years before. By 1911, she more or less agreed with Lenin’s
overwhelmingly negative assessment of all other elements in the RSDLP.

However,
when the Bolsheviks, for all practical purposes, carried out what Luxemburg
viewed as a definitive and destructive split in the RSDLP – setting up what was
essentially a separate Bolshevik party – Luxemburg (throughout 1912 and 1913)
denounced the move and persistently agitated for RSDLP unity, much to Lenin’s
chagrin.[8]

The
eruption of World War I, and the triumph of the Bolshevik-led Russian
Revolution (three years later, in 1917, which she passionately supported)
opened an entirely new phase in Luxemburg’s thinking. This included her helping
to found the German Communist Party at the start of 1919, but immediately after
it was cut short with her murder by a right-wing death squad.

While it
has been demonstrated that in 1904 Luxemburg distorted Lenin’s actual views in her
old anti-Bolshevik polemic, even here we can find rich insights for
revolutionary activists. She wrote:

On the
one hand, we have the mass; on the other, its historic goal, located outside of
existing society. On one hand, we have the day-to –day struggle, on the other,
the social revolution. Such are the terms of the dialectical contradiction
through which the socialist movement makes its way. It follows that this
movement can best advance by tacking betwixt and between the two dangers by
which it is constantly being threatened. One is the loss of its mass character;
the other, the abandonment of its goal. One is the danger of sinking back to
the condition of a sect; the other, the danger of becoming a movement of
bourgeois social reform.[9]

While Lenin was
dismissive of Luxemburg’s approach – tagging it “the whole notorious
organization-as-process theory” – an examination of his own account of the
evolution of Bolshevism in 1907 and again in 1920 show his own keen awareness,
after some years of experience, that the development of a revolutionary party
is indeed a process.[10] More
than this – although many commentators have counterposed a so-called
“spontaneist” idolisation of mass action by Luxemburg to a centralist idolisation
of a “vanguard party” by Lenin – a serious examination of their writings
reveals that both revolutionaries theorised a dynamic interplay of mass action
and organisation, often with strikingly similar formulations. In The Mass Strike, the Trade Union, and the
Political Party, Luxemburg wrote:

[t]he social democrats are the most
enlightened, most class-conscious vanguard of the proletariat. They cannot and
dare not wait, in a fatalist fashion, with folded arms for the advent of the
“revolutionary situation”, to wait for that which, in every spontaneous
peoples’ movement falls from the clouds. On the contrary, they must now, as
always, hasten the development of things and endeavor to accelerate events.[11]

In
What Is To Be Done?, Lenin wrote:

The
spontaneity of the masses demands a high degree of consciousness from us
Social-Democrats. The greater the spontaneous upsurge of the masses and the
more widespread the movement, the more rapid, incomparably so, the demand for
greater consciousness in the theoretical, political and organizational work of
Social-Democracy.[12]

Democracy

The
relationship of democracy to the struggle for socialism was another contested
question between Lenin and Luxemburg, but here also the realities were far more
complex and more interesting than is often assumed. We have noted that
Luxemburg was not inclined to support the nationalism of the oppressed,
particularly their right to national self-determination, in part because this
was not a working-class demand but instead was merely a bourgeois-democratic
demand, one which threatened to divide the workers and which would become
irrelevant if a working-class revolution was successful.

By 1915,
however, Lenin had become insistent on the necessity of fighting for all
democratic demands as inseparable from the workers’ struggle for socialism. It
is worth considering his position at length:

The proletariat cannot be victorious except through democracy,
i.e., by giving full effect to democracy and by linking with each step of its
struggle democratic demands formulated in the most resolute terms... . We must combine the revolutionary
struggle against capitalism with a revolutionary program and tactics on all
democratic demands: a republic, a militia, the popular election of officials,
equal rights for women, the self-determination of nations, etc. While
capitalism exists, these demands—all of them—can only be accomplished as an
exception, and even then in an incomplete and distorted form. Basing ourselves
on the democracy already achieved, and exposing its incompleteness under
capitalism, we demand the overthrow of capitalism, the expropriation of the
bourgeoisie, as a necessary basis both for the abolition of the poverty of the
masses and for the complete
and all-round
institution of all
democratic reforms.[13]

A terrible irony of the Russian Revolution, however,
is that the revolutionary-democratic triumph of 1917 was overwhelmed by horrific
catastrophes – including a brutalising civil war and foreign assaults – that
caused Lenin and his comrades to establish a one-party dictatorship. This was
sometimes projected as a pathway to socialism, with democracy to be
reestablished eventually.

“Socialist
democracy does not come as some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people
who, in the interim, have loyally supported a handful of socialist dictators”, Luxemburg
argued. Genuine socialism was inseparable from freedom, and “freedom must
always be freedom for those who think differently”. She warned: “Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of
press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every
public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the
bureaucracy remains as the active element ... at bottom, then, a clique affair
– a dictatorship, to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat but only
the dictatorship of a handful of politicians ...”[14]

On the other hand, Luxemburg also argued that the
Russian Revolution would be unable to move forward on the path she was calling
for until its desperate isolation was ended – above all by the triumph of socialist
workers’ revolutions in advanced industrial countries that could come to its
assistance, particularly Germany. She added that “whatever a party could offer
of courage, revolutionary far-sightedness and consistency in an historic hour,
Lenin, Trotsky and all the other comrades have given in good measure”. She
added that “there is no doubt either ... that Lenin and Trotsky on their thorny
path beset by traps of all kinds, have taken many a decisive step only with the
greatest inner hesitation and with the most violent inner opposition.”[15]

Luxemburg
and a number of her revolutionary comrades in Germany were murdered before they
could lead the revolution that she was calling for. Afterward, and after the
1921 publication of her unfinished critique of the Russian Revolution, Lenin
offered a glowing evaluation of his contentious comrade, insisting that “not only will Communists all over the world cherish
her memory, but her biography and hercomplete works ... will serve as useful manuals for training many
generations of Communists all over the world”.[16]

Neither
Lenin nor Luxemburg was invariably correct (or incorrect) on all points in
their various disputes. Each was able to identify important aspects of reality.
August Thalheimer, a revolutionary who knew and worked with both of them,
insisted on the formulation “not Luxemburg or
Lenin – but Luxemburg and Lenin”,
explaining that “each of them gave ... what the other did not, and could not,
give”.[17]

[8] On the
Bolshevik split, see Paul Le Blanc, “The Birth of the Bolshevik Party in 1912”,
Links, International Journal of Socialist
Renewal, April 17, 2012, http://links.org.au/node/2832.
On Luxemburg’s critical reaction, see Rosa
Luxemburg, “Credo: On the State of Russian Social Democracy,” in Peter Hudis
and Kevin Anderson, eds.,The
Rosa Luxemburg Reader(New
York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), 266-280.

[16] V.I.
Lenin, “Notes of a Publicist”, Collected
Works, vol. 33 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973), 210. It is worth noting
that Lenin was of the opinion that the platform of the Communist International
should be based on the program of the Russian Communist Party and also on the
program written for the Spartacus League by Rosa Luxemburg – see Gerda and
Hermann Weber, Lenin: Life and Works
(London: Macmillan Press, 1980), 154.